openSUSE 10.3 Alpha1

Last week I released openSUSE 10.3 Alpha1 and installed it on my laptop as well. There are not many user visible changes in the system, in most cases it looks like 10.2. But under the hood a number of changes have been done that will everybody:

The GNOME packages are now installed to /usr and not to /opt/gnome anymore – and therefore in the standard place. This allows us to remove a couple of patches and hacks.

KDE was updated to KDE 3.5.6.

Linux Kernel updated to 2.6.20 with new hardware support and drivers. With Alpha1, there’s no Xen support enabled but this should be fixed in the next Alpha.

A lot of people have asked for a real minimal text installation – and we have changed the patterns to allow this.

OpenOffice.org has been updated to version 2.1.

The whole distribution is build now with -fstack-protector to better guard against some buffer overflows.

Usage of LUKS by default for crypto partitions in YaST. Both GNOME and KDE handle removable LUKS media now (see the screenshot below).

As usual, all bugs should get reported in our bugzilla as explained in http://bugs.opensuse.org, discussion is most appropriate on the opensuse-factory@opensuse.org mailing list.

Disclaimer: This content is not supported by Novell. It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test it thoroughly before using it in a production environment.